ShaneBaxtor.com

Over the years we’ve seen video card manufactures offer us more and more memory on our video cards as they become faster, there’s no denying that 1GB and 2GB of memory has its place in high resolution gaming but when you’re paying more then you need too just because you want to say you have a 1GB graphics card there’s something wrong.

This is a topic that’s been on my mind for a long time and I always try to increase awareness that some models don’t need as much memory. The HD 5570 was released today and the Sapphire version I received carried with it 1GB of memory which for this model is really too much.

Having a look at Newegg.com you can get a HD 5670 with 512MB of memory for $92.99, if you want to double that RAM you’re looking at $109.99. For an extra $17 you’re really getting virtually no extra performance as I discovered in a recent review of the HD 5670 512MB here.

Now if you’re happy to spend an extra $17 for what is essentially going to do nothing when it comes to extra performance why don’t you spend another $20 on top of that and buy a HD 5750 for $129.99. The good news is that if you really want 1GB of memory it’s only going to cost you an extra $10, and again while you won’t see a performance increase at least you can say you have 1GB of memory. The problem is if you’re going to buy a 1GB HD 5750 for $139.99 for an extra $5 you could get a HD 5770 512MB for $144.99.

Up to the HD 5770 a 512MB card is going to be best, compared to the 1GB counterpart it will be cheaper and offer almost identical performance. For only slightly more you can get a 512MB version of the next model up when compared to the 1GB version of the lower model.

I can make a 1GB model show higher numbers then a 512MB card, if I bench two mid range cards at 2560 x 1600 the 1GB model will put out a higher number, so here you say to yourself, well I see there’s a performance improvement with the 1GB version. The problem is at this resolution it doesn’t matter if the card has 4GB of memory you’re not going to be able to get a minimum FPS that represents a playable frame rate.

Too often we see companies advertise a system with a 1GB graphics card and not the model itself. The sad thing is your friend who has a bit more knowledge can buy something that’s faster for less money. There’s a place for high MB models, but it’s not in this mid range segment. Maybe I’ll get some cards together and do an article to give you a better idea of how everything looks in a graph and look at this topic more. Think twice though the next time you go and buy a mid range model, why pay for more memory then you need?

The first thing I need you to know is that I’m under NDA when it comes to the HD 5570, in less than 24 hours though you’ll see a review of the model on TweakTown. After testing the card though and having a look at the whole ATI line up from HD 5400 to HD 5900 I’ve come to the conclusion that ATI are the best they’ve ever been.

For starters the companies financials aren’t completely up the creek like they have been over the past few years, more importantly though the company has been fast and aggressive with the HD 5000 series when it came to performance and models.

I’m not going to say they took advantage of the delays from NVIDIA and it’s 400 series because ATI didn’t know that was going to happen, but there’s nothing wrong with some luck. ATI got lucky here, maybe NVIDIA bit off more than they could chew, who knows but the delays have helped ATI plant their feet in the ground and move forward.

Speaking to a few people recently I found myself saying that ATI had the engineers to make good cards but the company on a whole lacked aggression, hunger and synchronization to be a real dominate force. This has been changing over the years and I think this is the first time where we’ve seen the company really coming together.

I look at people like Terry Makedon who heads the Catalyst driver team and not only do you have someone who knows what they’re doing but you have someone who really gives off the feeling that he enjoys his job, you get that feeling that when that new month’s driver gets WHQL approved a smile comes to his face and the rest of the team.

We seem to be seeing great synchronicity from everyone at ATI, everyone talks to everyone, and while someone in one department doesn’t know everything about every piece of technology they have a general idea, they don’t have to fake it, if they don’t know they ask someone else and a response comes quickly.

The most important thing for you to know though is that over the past five months ATI have had it easy on the competition front, what they need to do now over the coming months as NVIDIA open the flood gates is stand strong, offer new features through the Catalyst driver set, increase optimization in popular games and continue to let gamers know that buying a HD 5000 series card was the best decision they made.

What a week it’s been, we’ve heard heaps of little rumours about the HD 5830 and NVIDIA finally let us know what the name of its new series will be. With a couple of NDAs though this weeks samples have been fairly crazy.

Thursday saw the HD 5450 launch and I was ready with the Sapphire HD 5450 and ATI HD 5450 that arrived on Monday. MSI also let us know that the HD 5770 HAWK they sent was going to be under NDA till today so that came in early in the week and went straight to the testbed. This is an absolutely awesome version of the HD 5770, if you’re interested in this series I would highly recommend that you head on over to TweakTown and check out the review here.

Over the weekend the HD 5570 from Sapphire will hit the testbed in time for the NDA early next week, it’ll be interesting to see how this model sits between the HD 5450 and HD 5670. Gigabyte also sent over the new HD 5670 OC which will get a run sometime early next week.

On the RAM front Kingston sent over there new 24GB HyperX kit that was seen at CES last month, we’re still figuring out the best way to test this kit so we can see some advantages from the huge amount of memory on offer. If you’ve got any idea on benchmarks please feel free to leave a comment below.

Last but not least another high speed kit arrived, in this case it was a 4GB kit from G.Skill that is part of the PI Series. Coming in at 2300MHz DDR it’s not the fastest kit to date we’ve tested but it’ll be interesting to see how it performs.

Next week will be interesting, we’ve got a few companies that are hoping to get products ready before Chinese New Year, it will be either really busy or really quite. After that though it should be fairly full on with the HD 5830 launch and NVIDIA GTX 400 series launch in March.

For our Australian readers don’t forget about our competition here sponsored by PC Maniacs and iBuyPower Australia, and for everyone else don’t forget to check out the Global competition made possible by Corsair.

I try to be careful when I organise my video card samples, it’s hopeless getting in a bunch of cards that carry with it the same clocks and all that changes is the cooler. For the most part why should I waste my time benching a card that is going to give the same results, waste your time with results that are going to be similar and TweakTowns money with a review that’s not going to bring traffic.

Now there are some exceptions to this rule, if that model is part of a higher profile series like IceQ and iCooler from HIS or Vapor-X from Sapphire; due to the nature of these cards they get happily tested across all games even though they may carry with it the same or similar results in FPS related tests. People will Google these particular variations of models though and they shouldn’t have to look at a standalone review on a reference card just to know the performance.

On the other hand if Sapphire and HIS send two cards in at launch, slightly different coolers but both don’t slot into one of the aforementioned categories the excitement level isn’t high for card number two. So we do two reviews with these cards, the first is a standard single card review with card one. Who is card one? Well it’s generally the person who arrives first, in the case they both arrive at the same time it’s the person that told me they were sending it first.

For card number two though since it’s reference clocks and follows the reference PCB design to mix it up a bit I’ll make that second article a CrossFire or SLI one. This does a few things, one it makes the review different from the first, second we still get cooling numbers and noise levels off the card and finally it’s something a bit more interesting for you to read.

Recently though I had a company complain to me that the review looked like it was a CrossFire one and not on their card, to be honest I must’ve missed the part where I wrote about their package, card, cooler, included their names in all the graphs, wrote about the temperature and heat difference and wrapped it all up in a conclusion which covered both the technology and the card.

This company will now have a few options, the first is, unless they can be the first company to send a card before NDA they won’t get a standalone review, secondly they can just not send a card that has reference clocks if they’re not interested in being tested in a different fashion, instead they can just wait till OC models come out. Thirdly they can step back a second and realize I know what I’m doing after seven years when making sure that I give each company as much exposure as possible.

If the company doesn’t want to be included in a CF article many other companies will, after I have two reference cards I ultimately stop trying to organise any more until OC ones are available. Sure they can send an OC model which will get a standalone review but that company now misses out on a review on TweakTown, instead of getting two they now only have one. Since I make sure I don’t organise crap that also means the company will more then likely miss out on an award, that’s fine for me someone else can pick it up instead.

I’ve been doing TweakTown for over 7 years and this writing gig for even longer. These companies need to know that how I represent their product in a review is the best way for them. CrossFire and SLI articles are a way to mix it up a bit, it means I learn more about the performance and you do as well. It means that if someone on a forum goes, I’m thinking about having CF or SLI *insert mid range model* that forum goers can link to the article and say this is what you can expect.

After reading this I hope the company realizes that I do what I feel is the best for them. If they don’t though there’s someone else who is always happy to take the spot and get the exposure. As for other readers of my blog, this just gives you a bit of an idea of what we deal with behind the scenes, it’s one thing whinging because they don’t like the score, but to get an award, a high score and then complain that they don’t like how it’s tested; come on!

It seems that the people behind the NVIDIAGeForce twitter account decided to let us know what the two models for the new GeForce series that are due to be released hopefully in March. It seems that many people are slowly showing less and less interest over the series as delays continue to plague the model.

To keep everyone talking about it though we’ve heard that the first two models we’ll see from NVIDIA are the GTX 470 and GTX 480. We’re not sure why NVIDIA has chosen to skip the 300 series name, one person I spoke to from ATI made mention that maybe they’re worried about it sounding like the model is too far away from the HD 5000 series. How much truth this actully holds we’re not sure, we’ll probably never really find out why they skipped the 300 series name, mind you it’s possible that they’re maybe going to release mid range models under that name.

As the weeks go on we’re seeing more and more information come out about the models, of course NVIDIA is giving us the information and it’s all positive for them. We’ll no doubt be making up our own mind when the model arrives in March. We’re sure the models going to be fast but it’s exciting to find out what is on offer that NVIDIA hasn’t told us about.

One NVIDIA partner has said to me that while they haven’t got any official documentation from NVIDIA about the new models they’re pretty sure they’re correct.

As more information becomes available on the model we’ll let you know, what we really want is a solid date for the launch. We probably won’t hear that till March unless the release date is in the first week of March, in the case we’ll hear something closer to the end of February.

Let me start by making a few things clear, the first is that I use Eyefinity technology in my day to day usage, the image you can see above is my desk and that’s three Dell U2410s hooked up to a HD 5970. Second I know that I really gave surround gaming a beating the other day, but the reasons in that post though are why NVIDIA is going to lose the battle.

Today though I’m going to tell you why ATI and the Eyefinity branding is going to lose the war when compared to NVIDIA. Multi Screen technology is the future for computing in many ways, the biggest problem at the moment though is that both companies are spending too much time focusing on the gaming aspects of the technology and not the productivity aspect.

NVIDIA concentrating on the gaming side I can understand, the bottom line is that the way they are implementing Multi Screen Technology is flawed, and the reason it’s flawed is because it was added at the last minute. When NVIDIA discovered the technology in ATIs new HD 5000 series Video Cards it became clear that this is going to be the future, for that reason NVIDIA found a way to offer the same kind of technology, because Fermi was so far along though going back to the drawing board wasn’t going to be an option which meant we were going to see limitations.

Now the information we have from NVIDIA about the Surround Gaming technology is a bit limited at the moment, it does give us most the information we need though and even if a few surprises do pop up it doesn’t look like the technology can beat out Eyefinity.

Eyefinity is fantastic, I use it daily and love every second of it, I moved to my 3x 24″ setup from a single 30″, at one point thought I was using a dual 30″ setup, on a whole that setup just felt kind of stupid, it was massive and when I wanted to game a giant bezel down the middle did nothing for me, so I ended up back at a single 30″ which I thought gave me the desktop real estate I needed.

Towards the end of December thought I got WOWed by Eyefinity, and not in person, of course ATI didn’t let me know of any events where I could see the technology in person, albeit I give them some of the most quotable lines in my reviews which have shown up in their meetings and the fact that I review probably more video cards in a given year than anyone else. We won’t worry about that though. I got WOWed by screen shots and YouTube videos of people playing HAWX, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and more.

Thinking back now I don’t know why I let these videos persuade me because I barely have time for games, the bottom line is these videos and screenshots did persuade me. Since I have more Video Cards then I can poke a stick at getting into Eyefinity was only going to involve the cost of monitors (I don’t really review monitors and asking a company for three of anything is generally hard). When I finally set it up thought, fired up Sims 3 which seems to be the only game I have installed and realized that it looked completely crap at 5760 x 1200 I thought I had made a mistake with the purchase of these monitors.

The holidays came to an end and it was time to get back into work, feeling a bit bummed that I didn’t take full advantage of Eyefinity I was a bit concerned that $2,000AUD had been dropped for no reason. The launch of the HD 5670 changed this though, and in a big way since it was time to get back to work.

I consider myself a bit of a multi tasking master, I run two VNC windows on my machine, one to my server which has my MSN and all those useless programs that you don’t want clogging up your main PC and my laptop which runs my email so when I go away I don’t have to transfer files or that, I shut my laptop down and away I go. I have all past emails on my hand and when I get home I open it up, let it log onto the network and away I go again.

Not only do I have those two windows open all the time but when I’m benchmarking I have an excel spreadsheet for all my TweakTown graphs that takes up a whole monitor, along with that I will have a review or blog post open in word, folders to my main documents open, websites to double check pricing and specifications of models and images of the product I’m reviewing.

The nature of the three monitor setup opened me up to a new world of desktop real estate that I didn’t think existed. With Eyefinity this was done with one card and with ease. Productivity is at a new level, I’m more excited about all the windows I have open on my screen then I ever was about the gaming side of things.

The sad thing is thought that I had to discover this myself, sure ATI put how Eyefinity can expand productivity in between gaming and entertainment but every image you look at is about gaming, it’s Dragon Age on three screens and HAWX on six screens, it’s how this game works at 5760 x 1200 and that one at 7680 x 1600. Talking to editors after Eyefinity events they said, WOW it looks great, but it’s so gimmicky.

It’s true, and when you combine the fact that it’s expensive to get into an EyeFinity gaming setup it’s clear that the market is going to be a niche. You’re not catering to a market that is just gamers, you’re catering for a market that is for gamers who have serious cash to blow.

The focus of Eyefinity needs to change, it needs to be pushed as a tool. It needs to be pushed as something that is going to increase productivity, make multi tasking easier. ATI / AMD need to tell people who multi task that Eyefinity is the end to Alt Tabbing. NVIDIA can’t do this at the moment, they can’t push a technology that is aimed at people who have productivity in mind with a solution that requires two cards, or is resolution limited (We can’t confirm we’re limited to 1920 x 1080, but it’s the feeling we get from the white paper).

I spoke to someone today and they told me, ATI are going to hold an event pushing the productivity with the HD 5870 2GB card. This is the worst thing they could do, you don’t want to show people that you can do Eyefinity with a $500 card and then say it can also be done with a $99 one. People are going to think that clearly there’s going to be something wrong with the $99 solution. ATI / AMD, Manufactures, Wholesalers and Retail Stores need to show people who want productivity a setup of Eyefinity with a $99 card, on a box that costs less than $1000.

Gaming got my attention because I have the luxury of putting a HD 5970 into my own machine for less than it would cost most people to buy a HD 5670. The lack of time I have for games though let me discover what Eyefinity was really about, or at least should be about. A CEO, CFO, Stock Broker, Marketing Manager, Office Manager, e-Tailors and more aren’t going to see gaming though and go that would be great for my office.

I like ATI, I probably like ATI more than NVIDIA, there seems to be a certain attitude that people who work for NVIDIA have, they seem to think that we should bow to them because they are NVIDIA. I don’t hate that though, I understand it, I’m proud that I work for TweakTown, one of the largest Tech Websites in the world, if you tell me you work for JohnsAwsomeHardware.com I would probably have the same attitude.

NVIDIA can have this attitude though because they’re smart, they’re only pushing the gaming side of things at the moment because that’s all they can really offer you, if they promote productivity ATI / AMD would win because of a single card solution, the fact that a wide variety of prices are covered thanks to a huge model line up and more.

I guarantee you when NVIDIA release then generation of Video Cards after Fermi Multi Monitor Technology will be pushed, and it will be pushed to every user, from that person who sells on eBay and has photos, emails, websites and more open at a single time to CEOs of mega corporations where multi tasking is part of their everyday life.

Eyefinity will already have this stigma that it’s for Gaming, NVIDIA won’t have this, at the moment it’s called Surround Gaming, it won’t be called that in the future. When they can offer everyone a single card solution Multi Screen Technology or MST will become a name for the technology, something that doesn’t sound like a technology that only caters to one segment.

Eyefinity is a good name, it doesn’t sound like something that gamers will only use, ATI / AMD though need to change the way the technology is perceived though. Be that via creating an arm off Eyefinity that is something like Eyefinity Production+ or just push more than gaming under the Eyefinity name.

Sure, go to E3, setup Eyefinity with the hottest games, but make yourself present at tradeshows in which companies who could use this technology are, setup in front of the New York Stock Exchange and let brokers know this is the future of buying and selling shares, because you know what? NVIDIA will make sure they don’t miss out on this market.

Eyefinity do better what Matrox has done for years, now when we talk about Eyefinity we say things like “Yeah, Matrox use to do something similar but it wasn’t as good as Eyefinity.” What ATI / AMD need to do is make sure that in twelve months time we’re not saying “Yeah ATI had a similar technology but I love how NVIDIA offer the technology for my office.”

Today I understand that Eyefinity is a fantastic tool for productivity, I only truly understood this after taking the leap on the technology for gaming, something that most people won’t do.

I don’t want people who want to increase the way there business works wait twelve months for NVIDIA to release the same technology and market it better. I’m going to become a one man marketing team for Multi Screen Technology. I have two goals:

One is to make sure that people understand that Eyefinity isn’t just for gaming, this is a technology for anyone who is on a computer hours upon hours a day for work, people who have to Alt+Tab between screens, people who bought 30″ monitors because they needed more desktop real estate.

Second I want ATI to improve the technology, and I want NVIDIA to hit the market hard with it. This setup is going to be more useful then 3D Vision will ever be for NVIDIA.

We need to see more companies offer DisplayPort monitors, more companies offer three and six arm 24″ and 30″ monitor arms, we need manufactures, wholesales and salesman understand the technology so when they get asked a question they can give an answer.

This is a big post, but I have a plan, a goal, an agenda! Over the next few weeks there’s a few things I want to do to help bring this technology to an audience outside of gamers. So keep posted because while ATI / AMD will win this first battle in Multi Screen Technology NVIDIA will win the war because they’re hungry for success.

Recently we made mention about Galaxy working on a Dual GPU GTS 250 Video Card, while we made a slight jest at it due to the fact we figured Galaxy was probably only working on it because they where board it seems the model is very real.

While the card may look like a Dual PCB model now if you look carefully the second PCB is nothing more than a card which holds the three fans that the card uses. It also gives us a fair idea that the card going to take up at least three motherboard slots. When installed you can see the three fans run a blue LED setup and looks fairly nice. See images at the bottom of the page.

As for performance we can see that under 3DMark Vantage it manages to perform a little better than the older single GPU GTX 280. We can see that the card is overclocked to 675MHz on the core and the Shader Clock has been bumped to 1696MHz which helps improve performance overall. Having a look at the Xtreme Tuner HD software which is Galaxys own overclocking program we can see that the GU temp is only 45c, no doubt this is just idle though.

Since the GTS 250 is the highest end GPU that NVIDIA partners are currently working with it comes as no surprise that someone is trying to mix it up a bit in an effort to dump some cores.

We still have no information on any release date or retail pricing but as always we’ll keep you up to date if anything changes.

We’re not sure how popular a dual GPU GTS 250 would be but it’s always nice to see companies thinking outside the box.

With ATI set to launch the new Radeon HD 5500 and 5600 series at CES which starts on the 7th of January and the HD 5400 series later that month, the company is about to flood the market with a huge amount of low-end cards.

Word has come through that in the HD 5600 series alone ATIs partners will have the option to use as many of the six variances they want. Why we don’t know 100% what the different variances include we’ve been told it’s a combination of connectivity and memory. It’s probably fairly safe to assume that we’ll end up with an Eyefinity version along with 512MB and 1GB versions. Within the series we’ll no doubt see two model names which should consist of the HD 5650 and HD 5670 simply by going off past trends. 

As for the HD 5500 and HD 5400, we have been told that ATI will offer between two and three variances which means a total of six variances in those bottom two series and another six variances in the HD 5600 series bringing us to a grant total of 12 new video cards.

While I had planned to get stuck back into reviewing early January it has becoming extremely clear that the option to be a bit slack is quickly fading away.